On This Day – “25,000 Go to Alabama’s Capitol”

On March 25, 1965, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led 25,000 marchers to the state capitol in Montgomery, Ala., to protest the denial of voting rights to blacks.

(Source)

On This Day – “Alabama Police Use Gas and Clubs to Rout Negroes”

On March 7, 1965, a march by civil rights demonstrators was broken up in Selma, Ala., by state troopers and a sheriff’s posse.

Alabama state troopers and volunteer officers of the Dallas County sheriff’s office tore through a column of Negro demonstrators with tear gas, nightsticks and whips to enforce Gov. George C. Wallace’s order against a protest march from Selma to Montgomery.

At least 17 Negroes were hospitalized with injuries and about 40 more were given emergency treatment for minor injuries and tear gas effects.

The Negroes reportedly fought back with bricks and bottles at one point as they were pushed back into the Negro community, far away from most of a squad of reporters and photographers who had been restrained by the officers.

[In Washington the Justice Department announced that agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Selma had been directed to make a full and prompt investigation and to gather evidence whether “unnecessary force was used by law officers and others” in halting the march.]

Read the article in it’s entirety here: (Source)

On This Day – “Decision of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott Case”

On March 6, 1857, in its Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court held that Scott, a slave, could not sue for his freedom in a federal court.

The opinion of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott Case was delivered by Chief Justice Taney. It was a full and elaborate statement of the views of the Court. They have decided the following important points:

First – Negroes, whether slaves or free, that is, men of the African race, are not citizens of the United States by the Constitution.

Second – The Ordinance of 1787 had no independent constitutional force or legal effect subsequently to the adoption of the Constitution, and could not operate of itself to confer freedom or citizenship within the Northwest Territory on negroes not citizens by the Constitution.

Third – The provisions of the Act of 1820, commonly called the Missouri Compromise, in so far as it undertook to exclude negro slavery from, and communicate freedom and citizenship to, negroes in the northern part of the Louisiana cession, was a Legislative act exceeding the powers of Congress, and void, and of no legal effect to that end.

(Source)

“I’m Sorry But We Don’t Serve Colored Here”

On Feb. 1, 1960, four black college students began a sit-in protest at a lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., where they’d been refused service.

Excerpt from The New York Times article chronicling the sit-in protests:

The spark that touched off the protests was provided by four freshmen at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro. Even Negroes class Greensboro as one of the most progressive cities in the South in terms of race relations.

On Sunday night, Jan. 31, one of the students sat thinking about discrimination.

“Segregation makes me feel that I’m unwanted,” McNeil A. Joseph said later in an interview. ‘I don’t want my children exposed to it.’

The 17-year-old student from Wilmington, N. C., said that he approached three of his classmates the next morning and found them enthusiastic over a proposal that they demand service at the lunch counter of a downtown variety store.

About 4:45 P.M. they entered the F. W. Woolworth Company store on North Elm Street in the heart of Greensboro. Mr. Joseph said he bought a tube of tooth paste and the others made similar purchases. Then they sat down at the lunch counter.

The students asked a white waitress for coffee.

“I’m sorry but we don’t serve colored here,” they quoted her.

“I beg your pardon,” said Franklin McCain, 18, of Washington, “you just served me at a counter two feet away. Why is it that you serve me at one counter and deny me at another. Why not stop serving me at all the counters.”

The four students sat, coffee-less, until the store closed at 5:30 P. M. Then, hearing that they might be prosecuted, they went to the executive committee of the Greensboro N.A.A.C.P. to ask advice.

The Greensboro demonstrations and the others that it triggered were spontaneous.

The protests generally followed similar patterns. Young men and women and, in one case, high school boys and girls, walked into the stores and requested food service. Met with refusals in all cases, they remained at the lunch counters in silent protest.

Read the article in it’s entirety here: (Source)

On This Day – “High Court Rules Bus Segregation Unconstitutional”

On Nov. 13, 1956, the Supreme Court struck down laws calling for racial segregation on public buses.

“The Court affirmed a ruling by a three-judge Federal court that held the challenged statutes ‘violate the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.’

The Fourteenth Amendment provides that no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law nor deny to any citizen the equal protection of the laws.

[Officials of several Southern states indicated they would continue to enforce bus segregation laws despite the court’s decision. Segregationist leaders were bitter in their denunciations of the court and its ruling.]”

(Source)

On This Day – Martin Luther King Wins Nobel Prize For Peace

On Oct. 14, 1964, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was named winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

“The 35-year-old civil rights leader is the youngest winner of the prize that Dr. Alfred Nobel instituted since the first was awarded in 1901.

The prize honors acts ‘for the furtherance of brotherhood among men and to the abolishment or reduction of standing armies and for the extension of these purposes.’

Dr. King said that “every penny” of the prize money, which amounts to about $54,000, would be given to the civil rights movement.”

(Source)

On This Day – “Birmingham Bomb Kills 4 Negro Girls”

On Sept. 15, 1963, four black girls were killed when a bomb went off during Sunday services at a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, in the deadliest act of the civil rights era.

Parents of 3 of the Girls Are Teachers

Both parents of each of three of the victims teach in the city’s schools. The dead were identified by University Hospital officials as:

Cynthia Wesley, 14, the only child of Claude A. Wesley, principal of the Lewis Elementary School, and Mrs. Wesley, a teacher there.

Denise McNair, 11, also an only child, whose parents are teachers.

Carol Robertson, 14, whose parents are teachers and whose grandmother, Mrs. Sallie Anderson, is one of the Negro members of a biracial committee established by Mayor Boutwell to deal with racial problems.

Addie Mae Collins, 14, about whom no information was immediately available.

You can read the article in it’s entirety, as it was reported in 1963 by clicking on the following link: (Source)

“Freedom Riders” attacked on this day in 1961

On May 20, 1961, a mob of white persons attacked a racially mixed group of bus riders in Montgomery, Ala. The disorders lasted two hours. At least twenty of the riders were beaten, prompting the federal government to send in United States marshals to restore order.

Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy announced the Federal action in a telegram to Alabama officials. He said it was necessary to “guarantee safe passage in interstate commerce.”

Mr. Kennedy disclosed also that he would ask the Federal Court in Montgomery “to enjoin the Ku Klux Klan, the National States Rights Party, certain individuals and all persons acting in concert with them from interfering with peaceful interstate travel by buses.”

(Source)

On This Day in 1971…

On April 20, 1971, the United States Supreme Court upheld the use of busing to achieve racial desegregation in schools.

(Source)

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Killed On This Day in 1968

On April 4, 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., 39, was shot to death in Memphis, Tenn.

Dr. King was shot while he leaned over a second-floor railing outside his room at the Lorraine Motel. He was chatting with two friends just before starting for dinner.

One of the friends was a musician, and Dr. King had just asked him to play a Negro spiritual, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” at a rally that was to have been held two hours later in support of striking Memphis sanitation men.

Paul Hess, assistant administrator at St. Joseph’s Hospital, where Dr. King died despite emergency surgery, said the minister had “received a gunshot wound on the right side of the neck, at the root of the neck, a gaping wound.”

“He was pronounced dead at 7:05 P.M. Central standard time (8:05 P.M. New York time) by staff doctors,” Mr. Hess said. “They did everything humanly possible.”

Dr. King had come back to Memphis Wednesday morning to organize support once again for 1,300 sanitation workers who have been striking since Lincoln’s Birthday. Just a week ago yesterday he led a march in the strikers’ cause that ended in violence. A 16-year-old Negro was killed, 62 persons were injured and 200 were arrested.

Yesterday Dr. King had been in his second-floor room- Number 306- throughout the day. Just about 6 P.M. he emerged, wearing a silkish-looking black suit and white shirt.

Solomon Jones Jr., his driver, had been waiting to take him by car to the home of the Rev. Samuel Kyles of Memphis for dinner. Mr. Jones said later he had observed, “It’s cold outside, put your topcoat on,” and Dr. King had replied, “O.K., I will.”

Dr. King, an open-faced, genial man, leaned over a green iron railing to chat with an associate, Jesse Jackson, standing just below him in a courtyard parking lot:

“Do you know Ben?” Mr. Jackson asked, introducing Ben Branch of Chicago, a musician who was to play at the night’s rally.

“Yes, that’s my man!” Dr. King glowed.

The two men recalled Dr. King’s asking for the playing of the spiritual. “I really want you to play that tonight,” Dr. King said, enthusiastically.

The Rev. Ralph W. Abernathy, perhaps Dr. King’s closest friend, was just about to come out of the motel room when the sudden loud noise burst out.

Dr. King toppled to the concrete second-floor walkway. Blood gushed from the right jaw and neck area. His necktie had been ripped off by the blast.

“He had just bent over,” Mr. Jackson recalled later. “If he had been standing up, he wouldn’t have been hit in the face.

“When I turned around,” Mr. Jackson went on, bitterly, “I saw police coming from everywhere. They said, ‘where did it come from?’ And I said, ‘behind you.’ The police were coming from where the shot came.”

Mr. Branch asserted that the shot had come from “the hill on the other side of the street.”

“When I looked up, the police and the sheriff’s deputies were running all around,” Mr. Branch declared.

“We didn’t need to call the police,” Mr. Jackson said. “They were here all over the place.”

Mr. Kyles said Dr. King had stood in the open “about three minutes.”

Mr. Jones, the driver, said that a squad car with four policemen in it drove down the street only moments before the gunshot. The police had been circulating throughout the motel area on precautionary patrols.

After the shot, Mr. Jones said, he saw a man “with something white on his face” creep away from a thicket across the street.

Someone rushed up with a towel to stem the flow of Dr. King’s blood. Mr. Kyles said he put a blanket over Dr. King, but “I knew he was gone.” He ran down the stairs and tried to telephone from the motel office for an ambulance.

Mr. Abernathy hurried up with a second larger towel.

Policemen were pouring into the motel area, carrying rifles and shotguns and wearing helmets.

But the King aides said it seemed to be 10 or 15 minutes before a Fire Department ambulance arrived.

Dr. King was apparently still living when he reached the St. Joseph’s Hospital operating room for emergency surgery. He was borne in on a stretcher, the bloody towel over his head.

It was the same emergency room to which James H. Meredith, first Negro enrolled at the University of Mississippi, was taken after he was ambushed and shot in June, 1965, at Hernando, Miss., a few miles south of Memphis; Mr. Meredith was not seriously hurt.

Outside the emergency room some of Dr. King’s aides waited in forlorn hope. One was Chauncey Eskridge, his legal adviser. He broke into sobs when Dr. King’s death was announced.

“A man full of life, full of love, and he was shot,” Mr. Eskridge said. “He had always lived with that expectation- but nobody ever expected it to happen.”

But the Rev. Andrew Young, executive director of Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, recalled there had been some talk Wednesday night about possible harm to Dr. King in Memphis.

Mr. Young recalled: “He said he had reached the pinnacle of fulfillment with his nonviolent movement, and these reports did not bother him.”

Mr. Young believed that the fatal shot might have been fired from a passing car. “It sounded like a firecracker,” he said.

In a nearby building, a newsman who had been watching a television program thought, however, that “it was a tremendous blast that sounded like a bomb.”

There were perhaps 15 persons in the motel courtyard area when Dr. King was shot, all believed to be Negroes and Dr. King’s associates.

Police were reported to have chased a late-model blue or white car through Memphis and north to Millington. A civilian in another car that had a citizens band radio was also reported to have pursued the fleeing car and to have opened fire on it.

In his career Dr. King had suffered beatings and blows. Once- on Sept. 20, 1958- he was stabbed in a Harlem department store in New York by a Negro woman later adjudged insane.

That time he underwent a four-hour operation to remove a steel letter opener that had been plunged into his upper left chest. For a time he was critical list, but he told his wife, while in the hospital, “I don’t hold any bitterness toward this woman.”

(Source: New York Times)